1. Physical Separation and Land Swaps

This is the first of two chapters describing the plan itself. It covers the physical architecture: the new border, the relocations, the buffer zone, the land transfer, and the connections that turn two territories into one state. The next chapter covers the mechanism that keeps the peace.

The new border

On a date of its choosing, Israel declares its permanent international border. The line is drawn once, unilaterally, according to two principles that pull against each other and must both be honored: absorb the maximum share of the Israeli settler population without moving anyone, and leave the Palestinian state contiguous, coherent, and viable. Where the two principles collide, the plan resolves the collision in two ways: with engineering (see "One state, two wings," below) and with land (see "The transfer").

In practice, this means annexing the major settlement blocs: Ma'ale Adumim, the Gush Etzion bloc, Modi'in Illit, Beitar Illit, Givat Ze'ev, and, reaching deeper into the West Bank, Ariel and several of its satellite settlements. These blocs hold the large majority of the roughly half-million Israelis living beyond the Green Line, so annexation brings over 90% of the settler population inside Israel's new borders without a single family moving house. From that day forward, the word "settler" no longer applies in these towns. They are simply Israeli municipalities, inside Israel, and the plan calls for a deliberate wave of national investment to bind them into the country's fabric.

One honest acknowledgment is owed here, because informed readers will notice it anyway. Most prior frameworks (the Clinton Parameters, the Geneva Initiative, the Olmert map) treated the blocs near the Green Line as annexable, but drew the line at Ariel, which reaches twenty kilometers deep. This plan departs from that consensus deliberately. The political reality after October 7 is that no Israeli government, of any composition, is going to remove a city of twenty thousand people, and a plan that pretends otherwise will simply end up on the shelf. The departure has a price, and the plan pays it openly: the deeper the Ariel corridor reaches, the more the map owes the Palestinians elsewhere. This is part of why the land transfer described below is sized the way it is, and why the connectivity engineering around the Ariel corridor is treated as a core obligation rather than an afterthought.

The full settlement-by-settlement schedule — every community, its population, its disposition, and, for those relocated, its designated destination — will be published as Annex A, which is in preparation with the working group. The exact placement of the line around individual communities is among the questions the working group is being assembled to finalize. The principles above are not up for revision; the particulars are.

The relocations

The Israelis who remain outside the new border, those living deep in the West Bank beyond any line that leaves Palestine viable, are relocated into Israel. The document's working estimate is on the order of 25,000–40,000 people. The precise figure follows from the final placement of the line, and it is accounted for, community by community, in Annex A.

The plan is deliberate about learning from the 2005 disengagement, which remains a national wound less because of what was done than because of how it was done: communities were uprooted with no destination, scattered into hotel rooms and caravan parks, and in some cases waited years for permanent housing. This plan inverts each element of that failure:

• Destinations exist before anyone moves. New neighborhoods in the annexed blocs (in most cases a few kilometers down the road from the evacuated community) are built and ready in advance.
• Communities move as communities. Institutions, synagogues, and schools relocate together, rather than being dissolved into a housing lottery.
• Compensation is generous, published in advance, and structured to reward early, voluntary relocation.
• The timeline is humane, measured in a small number of years, with the border declared and the deterrence architecture already operating long before the last community moves.

None of this makes the relocations painless, and the plan does not claim that it does. The claim is narrower: a bounded, compensated, well-executed relocation of tens of thousands of people — hard as it is — is a price Israel can actually pay, once, in exchange for permanent recognized borders. The alternative is to keep paying forever, in soldiers, in isolation, and in wars, for borders that never arrive.

The buffer and the two barriers

Along the entire new frontier runs a buffer zone: patrolled, monitored, and permanently uninhabited, generally 500 meters to a kilometer wide. No one lives in it, farms it, or builds in it, on either side, ever. It is walled by two barriers, and the difference between them is deliberate and important.

On the Israeli side stands the permanent barrier: heavy, deep, sensor-laden, and engineered against tunneling and incursion. It carries the entire defensive burden, and it never moves — not one meter, in any direction, for any reason, forever. It is the physical form of the plan's first promise: Israel's borders are fixed in space.

On the Palestinian side runs a lighter demarcation barrier: a marked, monitored line that is engineered, from the outset, to be movable. Why the plan would deliberately build a movable border barrier is the subject of the next chapter. For now, the important point is that these two barriers work as a pair: it is the absolute permanence of the first barrier that makes the mobility of the second one safe.

The transfer

Unilateral annexation, on its own, would simply be theft, and the plan does not pretend otherwise. What prevents it from being theft is the other half of the exchange: simultaneously with annexation, Israel transfers sovereign territory from Israel proper to the new State of Palestine. This is a transfer with no precedent in the history of the conflict, and it leaves Palestine visibly larger, on any map, than the territory Palestinians hold today.

Two tracts pass to the new state:

• New Gaza — roughly 730 km² of the Negev along the Egyptian border, appended to the Gaza Strip, roughly tripling its territory. Gaza is the most crowded place in this conflict, and New Gaza is where it gets room to breathe: the site of the new cities, industrial zones, and development corridors described in Annex C.
• SoWeBa (the South-West Bank tract) — roughly 250 km² appended to the southwestern West Bank, partially offsetting the area lost to the annexed blocs, and giving the Hebron region its own share of the new land.

One drawing rule governs both tracts: their boundaries are set so that no existing Israeli community falls within them. The transfer is a transfer of land, not of anyone's home, in either direction.

The arithmetic of the whole exchange:

The new state begins at 110% of what Palestinians hold today, which comes to roughly 40% of the non-desert land between the river and the sea, for about 45% of its population. And 110% is the ceiling, permanently, for both sides: Israel can never take land beyond the schedule described in the next chapter, and no amount of Palestinian quiet ever adds a meter beyond the 110%. The state is born at its forever-maximum size.

Why is the transfer sized so generously? Not out of sentiment. The new land is what makes the plan's deterrence mechanism arithmetically and morally possible: it is the cushion that stands between a young, imperfect Palestinian state and the loss of any land that Palestinians actually hold today. The next chapter explains this in full. For now, it is enough to say that the transfer, the mechanism, and the fixed borders work as one machine. Remove any one part, and the other two stop making sense.

"Isn't this just trading prime West Bank land for empty desert?" Partly, yes — and the plan says so rather than disputing it. The annexed blocs are built, watered hill country; the transferred tracts are mostly arid. Three answers. First, the exchange is measured honestly in the table above: in raw area, Palestine grows, and the 40%-of-non-desert figure is published precisely so that no one has to take the map's word for anything. Second, the tracts arrive with the escrowed development program of Annex C — tens of billions of dollars in pre-committed capital, on the Gulf model of building cities in exactly this kind of desert — which is a form of value that no hillside carries on its own. Third, the alternative maps on offer transfer nothing at all.

One state, two wings

A Palestinian state in two territories, separated by Israeli land, can only work if the separation is legal rather than practical. That is, a Palestinian must be able to move between the two wings as easily as an Israeli drives between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The plan treats this connectivity as core sovereign infrastructure, placed in the non-strikeable Foundation Package of Annex C, rather than as a development aspiration:

• The Jenin–Rafah high-speed rail line, running the length of the country through every major Palestinian city (Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Hebron, then under Israeli territory to Gaza City, Khan Yunis, Rafah, and onward into New Gaza). A worker boards the train in Jenin and is in Rafah by lunchtime.
• Two sovereign road corridors, largely tunneled or covered along their routes, linking the West Bank to Gaza and to New Gaza, under Palestinian traffic authority from end to end.
• Internal link tunnels at the points where the annexation line pinches the West Bank's own geography, most importantly around the Ariel corridor, so that no Palestinian journey between Palestinian cities ever passes an Israeli checkpoint or waits on Israeli permission. The plan sets itself a simple test here: what matters is travel time, not how the map looks. The real measure of contiguity is how long it takes a truck to get from Nablus to Hebron, and the engineering is sized to make that answer an uninteresting one.
• The Port of Gaza and Palestine International Airport — the state's own doors to the world, on the timelines set by the failsafes chapter (the port in the early years; the airport when the airspace reverts at year five).

For more discussion, see the FAQs "How do people move between the West Bank and Gaza?" and "Who pays for the whole plan?" on the FAQ page.

Jerusalem

Jerusalem is divided into an Israeli zone and a Palestinian zone, with a shared civic zone between them holding the places sacred to both peoples. It is the one deliberate exception to the plan's logic of separation, and the one place where the two populations continue to mix daily. It is complicated enough, and important enough, that it receives its own chapter.

What is fixed, and what is open

A final word on the difference between this chapter's principles and its particulars. The principles are fixed: maximum absorption of settlers without relocation, wherever possible; a contiguous and viable Palestine; a permanently uninhabited buffer between a fixed barrier and a movable one; a transfer that leaves Palestine at 110%, its permanent ceiling; connectivity as sovereign infrastructure; and no existing community, Israeli or Palestinian, inside the transferred tracts. The particulars (the exact placement of the line around individual settlements, the final settlement schedule of Annex A, the precise tract boundaries) are the working group's first assignment, and the document publishes its working versions of them precisely so they can be challenged and improved.

What none of this yet explains is the question this plan exists to answer: what happens after the first rocket? That is the subject of the next chapter, which is the heart of the plan.

Next: The Plan II — The Deterrence Mechanism